HPE Morpheus Software – VM essentials has built-in observability, but a consolidated dashboard and deeper metrics need one extra step: OpsRamp, Prometheus, and Grafana or a native plug-in.

HPE Morpheus Software – VM essentials Observability

Going beyond the built-in basics

HPE Morpheus Software – VM essentials includes built-in observability at every layer of your infrastructure. Out of the box, the HPE Morpheus Manager UI shows memory, storage, CPU, and network trends at the cluster level and the host level and for each individual virtual machine (VM). For day-to-day operations—that is a useful baseline.

Figure 1. Built-in observability

As you operate HPE Morpheus Software – VM essentials at scale, there are two areas where you can go deeper.

The gaps

A consolidated cross-VM view—HPE Morpheus Manager lets you navigate into each VM to see its observability data. A consolidated dashboard where all VMs are visible side by side for comparison, capacity planning, and spotting resource-hungry workloads is something you can add on top.

Richer observability from the underlying stack—HPE Morpheus Manager surfaces the essentials: CPU, memory, storage, and network. The underlying KVM and host stack exposes significantly more—CPU scheduling wait time, how much memory VMs actually use vs. what’s allocated, per-interface packet errors and drops, hardware temperature, power consumption, and more. All three options below surface this deeper layer of observability.

Three options to bridge the gap

HPE OpsRamp Software

HPE OpsRamp Software is the commercial, fully supported option. It integrates with HPE Morpheus Software – VM essentials clusters and provides consolidated observability across VMs, hosts, and clusters with alerting, threshold management and dashboards included. If you need something supported out of the box with no custom development, HPE OpsRamp Software is the right call.

Trade-off: An additional license on top of HPE Morpheus Software – VM essentials per socket license

Prometheus and Grafana

The open-source path uses two lightweight exporters deployed on each HVM host. The Libvirt Exporter collects VM-level observability data by querying libvirt directly—per-VM CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network stats. The Node Exporter collects host OS data including CPU, memory, filesystem, network, and system health. Prometheus scrapes both exporters and stores the time-series data. Grafana provides the visualization layer.

This gives you the full depth of available observability, live dashboards, and historical analysis.

Trade-off: Both Prometheus and Grafana sit outside HPE Morpheus. Operators need to context switch to a separate tool and you are responsible for running and maintaining the external stack.

HPE Morpheus plug-in

The third path brings consolidated observability directly into HPE Morpheus Manager—no separate tool required. A custom plug-in, built on the HPE Morpheus plug-in framework, pulls data from Prometheus and surfaces it in the Analytics page that operators already use.

The plug-in dashboard lives under Operations > Analytics in HPE Morpheus Manager. It displays per-VM data across VMs simultaneously, auto refreshing every 60 seconds, with no manual report generation required. Note that Prometheus still needs to run in your environment—the plug-in queries Prometheus rather than the exporters directly.

Trade-off: HPE provides the base; you own the customization and upkeep. Not HPE supported. Requires Prometheus.

Figure 2. The observability plugin dashboard in HPE Morpheus Manager

What the plug-in adds

The plug-in surfaces deeper observability than what HPE Morpheus Manager shows natively.

From the Libvirt Exporter:

• CPU scheduling wait time per VM
• Memory reclamation and actual usage per VM
• Per interface packet drops and errors
• Storage pool capacity and allocation

From the Node Exporter:

• Time processes spend waiting for CPU, I/O, and memory
• Hardware temperature per sensor
• Power consumption per host

Where to start

HPE Morpheus developer portal

developer.morpheusdata.com

Plug-in documentation

developer.morpheusdata.com/docs

HPE Morpheus reports plug-in sample

github.com/HewlettPackard/morpheus-plugin-samples

HPE OpsRamp Software for HPE Morpheus Software – VM essentials

docs.opsramp.com/integrations/virtualization/vm-essentials

Choosing the right path

If you need something supported today with no development work—HPE OpsRamp Software; if your team already runs Grafana and is comfortable with open-source tooling—Prometheus and Grafana; and if your operators live in HPE Morpheus Manager and you want consolidated observability without sending them to another tool—the plug-in approach is the right direction.

What’s coming

Native observability enhancements are on the HPE Morpheus Software – VM essentials road map. The options above are pragmatic bridges for teams that need deeper observability today, before those enhancements land.

Pick the path that fits your team and get started today—set up Prometheus and Grafana, explore the plug-in sample on the developer portal, or evaluate HPE OpsRamp Software.

Meet the author:

Goutham Sabala, HPE CloudOps Software Suite, Sr. Principal Technical Product Manager

Goutham is an experienced cloud and virtualization professional focused on driving HPE private cloud strategy and solutions from both technical and product perspectives.